Assessing Gaze and Pointing: Human Cue Interpretation by Indian Free-Ranging Dogs in a Food Retrieval Task
Srijaya Nandi, Dipanjan Roy, Aesha Lahiri, Anamitra Roy, Anindita Bhadra

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that Indian free-ranging dogs can interpret combined human pointing and gazing cues to find hidden food, emphasizing the importance of cue redundancy in interspecific communication.
Contribution
It provides novel evidence that free-ranging dogs rely on multimodal human cues, highlighting the role of signal clarity and dog demeanor in cue comprehension.
Findings
Dogs succeeded only with combined cues, not unimodal or conflicting.
Affiliative dogs showed higher success rates and shorter approach latencies.
Demeanor influenced engagement but not cognitive ability to interpret cues.
Abstract
The urban habitat provides a landscape that increases the chances of human-animal interactions, which can lead to increased human-animal conflict, but also coexistence. Some species show high levels of socio-cognitive abilities that enable them to perceive communicational gestures of humans and use them for their own benefit. This study investigated the ability of Indian free-ranging dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) to utilise human social-referential cues (pointing and gazing) to locate hidden food, focusing on the relative effectiveness of unimodal versus multimodal cues. A total of 352 adult free-ranging dogs were tested in an object-choice task involving six different cue conditions: control (no cue), negative control (one baited bowl, no cue), combined pointing and gazing, pointing-only, gazing-only, and conflicting cues (pointing and gazing at opposite bowls). The dogs successfully…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsHuman-Animal Interaction Studies · Hemispheric Asymmetry in Neuroscience · Rabies epidemiology and control
